Tom Renk

When scholars like Marshall Sahlins or Jared Diamond contrast hunter-gatherers to pastoralists, they do so with the suggestion that hunter-gatherers were in many ways healthier than us. Diamond reaches the conclusion that the Neolithic agricultural revolution was “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.”

While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients.

Contrary to earlier assumptions, hunters and gatherers—even today in the marginal refugia they inhabit—are nothing like the famished, one-day-away-from-starvation desperados of folklore. Hunters and gathers have, in fact, never looked so good—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure. Agriculturalists, on the contrary, have never look

One of the biggest problems is a loss of nutritional variety and quality. Hunter-gatherers survive because they eat just about anything and everything that is edible. Hunter-gatherers therefore necessarily consume an extremely diverse diet, typically including many dozens of plant species in any given season.

When reduction of a symptom is mild, obviously its source and cause still exist, so relapses can and do occur. In contrast, after the mental model at the root of symptom production has been unlearned and nullified, relapse is not possible and the symptom is fully eliminated.

It hardly seems an exaggeration to regard the limbic brain’s power to create emotional reality as a kind of magic, or maya, that immerses one in a potent spell that feels absolutely real and would last for a lifetime.